The original nature of man / by Edward L. Thorndike.

  • Edward Thorndike
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The original nature of man / by Edward L. Thorndike. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    self-preservation, the social instinct, the gambling instinct, the play instinct, the instinct for justice, and the like .witness to the great number of human tendencies whose descriptions are still of the pattern of the first stage—mere statements that some- how or other a certain result is attained. Instincts as mythical potencies are, to say the least, not rigor- ously excluded by even two very recent and in many ways ad- mirable discussions—one, of the relation of instinct to intelli- gence ; the other, of the significance of instincts for a philosophy of education. The eminent psychologists who discussed ‘In- stinct and Intelligence’ in the British Journal of Psychology two years ago [To, vol. 3, pp. 209-266] again and again speak of instinct as if it were something like a heart or a thyroid gland or a ‘memory’ or an ‘imagination,’ which did this and that for a man. Henderson seems deliberately to advocate remaining in this first stage of thought in the case of unlearned tendencies. He says:— “The instincts are the functions of the organism considered from the point of view of the needs that they supply. Most lists of instincts are selected according to this conception, as the feeding instinct, the instinct of fear, of sociability, of acquisitiveness, of curiosity. On the other hand, the instinctive act is a complex of movements that constitutes an hereditarily preferred method of carrying out one or many instincts. Cry- ing, for example, is an instinctive act, and it may be resorted to as a means of satisfying the instinct of hunger, that of fear, that of sociability, and, indeed, almost any instinct that appears during the period when this type of activity prevails. Just as one instinctive act may be utilized by many instincts, so one instinct may function by means of a variety of types of in- stinctive or habitual activity. Thus the instinct of fear may lead to a resort to the instinctive acts of crouching, lying still, or hiding, or that of flight, or in extreme cases, perhaps, that of desperate fighting.” [To, p. 65] Next to the separation of what is original from what is learned, the main task of a description of the original nature of man is to progress from the first to the second of these stages.* ♦Progress from the second to the third stage will depend upon researches yet to be made. If the inventory and description of the original intellect
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